There’s not enough written, I think, about bad food – failed meals, awful things other people have served us, horrid things we like to eat in private – unless it’s in one of those embarrassment columns, the adult equivalent of that Young Miss column where girls write in with "hilarious" tales of getting their periods in awkward places. (like in an all-white convertible, let’s say.) "I was so embarrassed when I accidentally served a blue turkey on Thanksgiving!" writes the humiliated but game submitter. "Ever since then, my family mocks me until I cry every holiday!"
But failed food isn’t funny, not REALLY. Food costs money, for one thing, and a ruined meal can seem like a big platter of money turned to ashes. And it’s humiliating to fail, only funny long afterwards and with a LOT of effort – who wants to be known forevermore as the witless woman who served a blue turkey at Thanksgiving?
I was once at a meal where everything had gone wrong – the dinner was a nauseating failure, the milk was spoiled, even the olives had been opened to reveal a thick layer of mold – and there was nothing really to do about it. Our hosts lived too far away from anywhere and were too poor for the meal to be replaced and so it was eaten, my husband and I hiding things our daughter quietly handed us in our pockets and bags, drinking her spoiled milk ourselves when our hosts backs were turned to save their feelings.
"Thank you. It was delicious," we lied afterwards and left, stopping a few miles down the road so I could throw up in a ditch. My husband and I still remember that meal years later with a lurid nostalgia, it being a truly unique final meal with some dear declining people, their final attempt to take care of us once more and what could we do but lie about it to them? They loved us and we loved them and wanted to spare them any pain.
My husband’s birthday is coming up quickly. We generally invite his parents and grandmother and my parents to go out for dinner with us and then back here for cake afterwards. Sounds like a nice evening, right?
Dear Young Miss: I ruin my husband’s birthday cake every year. What’s up with that?
IT IS TRUE – every year, my husband’s birthday cake is a nightmarish, lumpy horror with a texture like a kitchen sponge or a brick or something terribly in-between. I CAN bake cakes but something about making a cake for all of our parents causes my cakes to fail, like a wicked changeling switched in the oven for my real cake (which is, of course, delicious and airy and beautifully frosted and being eaten by mean little imps in the basement, no doubt.). It doesn’t bother me so much about my own parents, since they’ve had plenty of occasions to eat my regular, successful baking, but wrecking a cake that my in-laws are going to eat EVERY TIME? Oh, that’s embarrassing. And every year I head into the kitchen with the same good intentions and the same grim results, and every year, my husband cheerfully eats his awful, awful cake and then kisses me.
"Thank you," he always says. "It was delicious."